with comments by Alex Brooks
At the age of 16 the short entries of his first few years begin to get a little more lengthy and complicated. His main subject, at first, for these longer entries, was various financial transactions that he engaged in. In October 1810 he went on a trip to sell onions in Lanesborough, Dalton and Hinsdale. He carried Mr. Moore ten bushels of apples, which finished paying for the hat he bought two weeks earlier. In November of 1810 he went to Sand Lake, to sell onions and apples, where he also bought ten yards of cotton cloth and a week later took a load of onions, apples, turkeys and pickles, all of which he sold successfully. The complexity of the trading grows:
Jan 31, 1811: At night I carried two bushel of corn to Mr. Dark’s store, they give four and six pence a bushel, and I carried a due bill, I took the 8 of the present month, I traded it all out for one pound of ginger, a pint and a half of rum and a shirts cloth and bought a pound of brown sugar, besides I paid the cash for a plug of tobacco and a pencil.
In the summer of 1810, at the age of 18, a few entries appear that suggest his thoughts have begun to turn to girls. On July 11, he paid three dollars and fifty cents to attend a ball held at Abner Bull’s Inn. A week later he notes that Reuben Chapman ran away because “he had child said to him by Livela Gree.” In the fall of 1810 he went to balls and other entertainments quite frequently, usually noting what it had cost him to go.
A Murderer From Hoosick
July 19, 1811: Friday I went to Troy to see a man hung by the name of Mr. Winslow Russel. He lived in the town of Hoosuc, where he killed a man by the name of Michael Bochies. He struck him with a billet of wood, and repeated his blow. The people that went to see Russel hung was estimated about 10 and some say 12,000.
The next Thursday it rained, and Holcomb went to his friend Benjamin Sackett’s house and borrowed a book about the trial of Winslow Russel.
The summer of 1811 he worked a good deal for neighbors in the area, doing whatever was required on neighboring farms to make a few bucks. One of his money-making ventures went awry that fall, however:
September 12, 1811: Thursday in the forenoon I pulled onions and laid up rail fence. In the afternoon I went to training at Abner Bull’s Inn. Lyman Spring and myself carried a barrel of cider to sell by the quart, but some told us that it was against the law without a license, and we give away the cider and sold cake for as much as the cider was worth so that we should not get fined. Mr. A. Bull came in to the street and set my cider a-running on the ground. We made about three dollars this day.
Most of the rest of September and October that year was taken up with making and selling cider.